What Is Centrism?

August 7, 2022

 

For Climbing to the Center, I picture communities situated in valleys surrounding a high mountain. The valleys channel various tributaries of a river they all join downstream, but here, are separate rivers with very separate populations. One may support coal miners; another, orchardists. One is home to artists and hippies, another to retired folk. In one, German farmers raise onions and potatoes; in another, the crop may be marijuana.

People upriver are looked on askance, maybe objects of derision. More distant neighbors are less known, more of a mystery, and certainly not of great concern. Our own place among the mountain’s brood is not clear. It’s our mountain.

I lived in a valley in Colorado, where peaks above 14,000 feet stood about us in three directions. I was one to hike the trails, but claimed no interest in reaching a summit.  That was until one day, when a climber friend invited us to summit Mt. Sneffels. Reaching the top was a game changer. Suddenly I saw where we all stood, how it all fit together—which river ran into which other, where we sat among the other peaks, who our neighbors were. 

It was a lot of work and perilous climbing to the peak: boulders to climb over, narrow trails with sharp drop-offs, steep and unrelenting. At one point we had to step across a crevice where a misstep could have sent one hundreds of feet to the rocks below.

This is a metaphor. I’m talking about what it means to be a Centrist.

The term has been defined in various ways over the years, and from Wikipedia to The Atlantic and beyond. Wrongly so, I believe.

Here are some of the ways Atlantic forum writers have described Centrists:

·      The compromising centrist

·      The apathetic centrist

·      The ambivalent centrist

·      The impossible centrist

These titles are fairly self-explanatory, I think, but a reading of the article will clarify.

Writers from the Atlantic have also weighed in on centrism over the years, and their assessments give some idea of the, in my opinion, misconstruing of centrism.

·      “They’re popular,” wrote Matthew Cooper.

·      “They’re trouble,” according to Ross Douthat.

·      “They couldn’t care less about bipartisanship,” says Clive Cook.

But, says Molly Ball, they are principled advocates for a bipartisan republic (she calls them moderates). This comes closer to what I believe centrism is about, and what I aspire to as a centrist. And yes, I believe Philip Bump is onto something when he says, “It’s a vanity term.”

No, I don’t feel it’s vanity to stand out from the crowd, “to be part of a group not beholden to prefabricated opinions.” Add to that, the latest ideology.

So, seeing centrism as a mountaintop, and considering what it takes to get there, is a centrist merely a compromiser (I will just climb up to that shoulder, but don’t ask me to go onto the boulders)?  Is she apathetic (I don’t care if I make it to the top, because frankly I don’t care what’s on the other side of the mountain.)?  Is he ambivalent (Hmmm, not sure what I’m seeing out there, but maybe it doesn’t matter?)  Or impossible—too much to hope for (nobody can climb up there?)

I believe centrism entails a choice, an energetic commitment to find answers that work, to slog through the mud of indecision and brushwhack the confusion of conflicting ideas and fight the well-worn, easy downward paths of ideology, and to climb to a point where the truth of the situation can be seen clearly.

That’s what this blog will be about. In one way or another, I hope to write about situations that illustrate this principle in daily life.

I don’t claim they are the only ones, and hope readers can supply their own, or simply consider whether these examples have merit.